It may be comedy sacrilege, but I never thought the original Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was quite as good as its reputation. It was good and Douglas Adams, whom I once interviewed for a magazine, was very likeable. But the original Hitchhiker never quite lived up to its later reputation. Perhaps nothing could.
The BBC’s first Director General, Lord Reith, must nowadays spend most of his time turning in his grave. His most famous original directive was that the Beeb should “educate, inform and entertain”. It is very rare nowadays that anyone succeeds in simultaneously achieving all three. But I suppose it was always very rare.
Last night, though, Helen Keen and her writing partner Miriam Underhill achieved it.
I went to a recording at BBC Broadcasting House of their four-part Radio 4 series It Is Rocket Science! which had to be very extensively (and has been very successfullly) re-written for radio because the original 2008 and 2010 stage versions were so visual.
The It Is Rocket Science! series will be transmitted on BBC Radio 4 early in the new year and I suspect it will get a lot of coverage because it manages to be intelligent, intriguing and funny – and it is as accessibly informative as it is funny.
Off-hand, I can’t think of anything similar that I’ve ever heard on radio.
It could be a classic in the making.
SO IT GOES - John Fleming's blog 